Future Economy

Earth’s ecosystems have massive value. But that value is hard to measure and often gets ignored – with alarming consequences for the environment.

This lack of focus on environmental degradation has steered economic policy and investment in harmful directions, including a reliance on fossil fuels and growing inequality, and away from the fair and sustainable use of the planet’s finite resources.

UNEP’s report Becoming #Generation Restoration (June 2021) found that half of the world’s GDP is dependent on nature, and every dollar invested in restoration creates up to 30 dollars in economic benefits.

Meanwhile,  environmentally harmful subsidies are causing catastrophic damage to our global ecosystems and widespread sickness and death in human communities.

Fossil fuels alone, (coal, oil, and natural gas) received $5.9 trillion in subsidies in 2020 — or roughly $11 million every minute — according to a new analysis (Sept. 2021) from the International Monetary Fund.

Five countries — China, the United States, Russia, India, and Japan — account for two-thirds of subsidies globally. All five countries belong to the G20, which in 2009 agreed to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies “over the medium term.”

Helping development is a worthy investment with potentially high returns for all.  These objectives were anchored by the Millennium Development Goals and 15 years later by the Sustainable Development Goals set out for 2030. The latter represent a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity, for people and the planet, now and into the future. They require significant investments in both human and physical capital.

Until recently, development progressed steadily, albeit unevenly, with measurable success in reducing poverty and child mortality. But even before the pandemic, many countries were not on track to meet the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, and then COVID-19 hit the development agenda hard (IMF June 2021), followed by the war in Ukraine.

How can we hope to make meaningful progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals under these new even more difficult circumstances?

This session will examine:

• The latest insight on the shortcomings of GDP, new yardsticks for sustainability, natural capital accounting, and and how going “beyond GDP” is creating more sustainable, measurable economic opportunities while at the same time reducing risk to natural and human ecosystems.
• Who must lead on reducing subsidies, the pathways to success, and the consequences for the current push for even more fossil fuels to power the global economy.
• The role of public and private finance needed to substantially achieve the SDGs. Where will the money come from, what incentives are there for investors now, what is the role of the business community, and how must we adapt to overcome the acute near-term challenges to increasing global prosperity without environmental degradation?